{"id":116996,"date":"2017-10-24T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116996"},"modified":"2017-10-23T15:56:11","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T19:56:11","slug":"anita-brookner-no-latter-day-jane-austen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/24\/anita-brookner-no-latter-day-jane-austen\/","title":{"rendered":"Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anita Brookner. Photo: Rex Features<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize\u2013winning Hotel du Lac<\/em>, the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women. The novelist Tessa Hadley admitted in the Guardian <\/em>that before reading her, \u201cI\u2019d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.\u201d On a recent episode of the Backlisted<\/em> podcast, the literary critic and Brookner convert Lucy Scholes said, \u201cFor many years, I labored under that rather stupid impression that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form a spinster can take.\u201d It didn\u2019t help that Publishers Weekly<\/em>, in 1990, described Brookner as \u201ca latter-day Jane Austen,\u201d a label oft repeated despite its almost comical inaccuracy.<\/p>\n

If Austen popularized the marriage plot, Brookner upended it, immersing us in the emotionally clandestine lives of mistresses and other romantic misfits. Literature from the point of view of \u201cthe other woman\u201d is rare, and she is the genre\u2019s subversive maestro. Cheated-on wives, in her portrayal, are too self-centered, ruthless, and confident to warrant our compassion. In any case, their marriages and invariably privileged lives are never in jeopardy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In The Rules of Engagement<\/em> (2003), the unhappily married narrator, Elizabeth Wetherall, embarks on an affair with her older, undesirable husband\u2019s charismatic friend. Before she does so, she grimly assesses her soon-to-be lover\u2019s wife:<\/p>\n

Small, dark, and sardonic, she was tacitly given permission to interrupt her husband, to demand attention, to wait with a cigarette between her long fingers until he lit it for her; and to view me with an amused insistence which seemed to me to hold little indulgence \u2026 She was rude, with the rudeness of a moneyed woman who was wealthier than her husband.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The gift for demanding attention is, in Brookner-land, the defining characteristic of the successfully married woman. As a teenager, Elizabeth has already diagnosed herself as \u201cnot the kind of woman who sent out the right messages.\u201d She was excluded, she perceived, \u201cby some sort of biological misunderstanding\u201d from the high-flown passion she saw in films. Yet nurture, not nature, is to blame. What has marked Elizabeth for life is the hostile atmosphere at home, the palpable enmity between an unfaithful father and a mother whose \u201cscornful bitter voice in the bedroom filled me with horror.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Brookner\u2019s tragic vision, the die is cast by family dynamics, and one\u2019s destiny, so ordained, cannot be averted via either inner or outer resources. Her heroines rarely aspire to personal growth (the very phrase would doubtless strike them as embarrassingly American). Nor do they undergo psychotherapy (which only features in her novel most explicitly about the Holocaust, Latecomers<\/em>). Rachel Kennedy in A Friend from England <\/em>has aquaphobia and is plagued by recurrent symbolic dreams but considers any kind of self-analysis dangerous. \u201cTelling dreams, like blaming one\u2019s parents, or falling in love and making a fool of oneself, comes into my category of forbidden things.\u201d Safer to stick to superficial attachments, easily ditched.<\/p>\n

Look at Me<\/em> (1983), one of Brookner\u2019s earliest, saddest, and best novels, is a sustained and gripping meditation on her central theme: the inevitable and Darwinian triumph of the shallow and grasping over the observant and kind. Frances Hinton, an aspiring novelist who works in a medical library, is scarred by a past affair with, it is indicated, a married man (\u201cThat time of which I never speak … That secrecy, that urgency, that lack of hope\u201d). When she is taken up by Nick and Alix Fraser, a glamorous couple she meets through work, deliverance from past mistakes and a brighter future seem possible.<\/p>\n

Alix, a charming emotional terrorist, takes a proprietorial interest in Frances (or, as she calls her,\u00a0\u201cLittle Orphan Fanny\u201d), who marvels \u201cI had been rescued from my solitude; I had been given another chance.\u201d As she responds to the overtures of the Frasers\u2019 divorced friend James, her writing habit is superseded by, if not quite happiness, then its tantalizing prospect. The passage in which she reflects on her new circumstances is a beautiful and brutal x-ray of a writer\u2019s soul:<\/p>\n

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world\u2019s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state \u201cI hurt\u201d or \u201cI hate\u201d or \u201cI want.\u201d Or, indeed, \u201cLook at me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the end, James rejects Frances in favor of Alix\u2019s friend Maria, a gregarious Italian divorc\u00e9e who requires no such permission. In the climactic scene at the group\u2019s habitual restaurant, Maria\u2019s uninhibited carnality underscores Frances\u2019s impregnable reticence, and she finds herself in a Boschian hellscape: \u201cThe faces before me seemed to me to be flushed, venial, corrupt, gorged with sweet food and drink, presaging danger. Smoke wreathed the hot air, and flakes of ash fell on the unheeded plates.\u201d Completing the nightmare is her realization that Alix had \u201cforeseen or even contrived\u201d the situation and was dissatisfied by Frances\u2019s failure to display shock or anger.<\/p>\n

Frances, however, lacks the requisite boldness to either throw a public fit or take a permanent place among the lucky ones. \u201cI now feel that all good fortune is a gift of the gods,\u201d said Brookner in her 1987 Art of Fiction<\/a>\u00a0interview with The Paris Review<\/em>, \u201cand that you don\u2019t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being\u00a0bold<\/em>.\u201d Frances\u2019s solitude is thus an incurable condition. The rewards of fiction writing will do duty, she decides, for more conventional forms of happiness. And yet, for all the heartbreaking defeatism of her pledge to writerly claustration, the reader is left with a suspicion that for Frances, living without a creative outlet\u2014\u201cthat inner chemical excitement that made me run the words through my head while getting ready to set them down on the page\u201d\u2014would eventually have proven more debilitating than spinsterhood.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps seeking a note of hope, albeit a faint one, is to miss the point of Brookner\u2019s philosophy, in which happy endings are spurious and disappointment unassuageable. For her, writing was merely \u201ca displacement activity,\u201d not a raison d\u2019\u00eatre. \u201cIf I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn\u2019t be writing,\u201d she told The Paris Review<\/em>. \u201cAnd I doubt if I should want to.\u201d She insisted in her last interview, with the Telegraph<\/em> in 2009, that she derived no satisfaction from completing novels, nor pride in their success. \u201cI think most writers are monomaniacs; they just go on,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s probably true of me too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone craving consolation or\u2014God forbid\u2014inspiration won\u2019t find it in the travails of Brookner\u2019s characters. Those readers, though, are spoiled for choice elsewhere, nowadays more than ever. Brookner\u2019s singular legacy, long may it endure, is a sentimentality-free perspective on the inherited and unsolvable hazards of heterosexuality. And if her work\u2019s appeal is limited by its principled refusal to let the modest stoics emerge victorious over the brash egomaniacs, its primary focus on the inner lives of lonely, courageous, intelligent women, then Brookner was fine with that. \u201cI\u2019m not very popular,\u201d she once said of her novels, \u201cbecause they\u2019re bleak and they\u2019re mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I\u2019m only writing fiction. I\u2019m not making munitions, so I think it\u2019s acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable, <\/em>Longreads, <\/em>Newsweek, the<\/em>\u00a0Daily Beast, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Awl, <\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize\u2013winning Hotel du Lac, the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31215],"tags":[31214,21523,31209,21524,31213,31212,31210,10871,31211],"class_list":["post-116996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-books","tag-a-friend-from-england","tag-anita-brookner","tag-backlisted-podcast","tag-hotel-du-lac","tag-latecomers","tag-look-at-me","tag-lucy-scholes","tag-tessa-hadley","tag-the-rules-of-engagement"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For decades, Anita Brookner suffered from a misleading literary reputation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/24\/anita-brookner-no-latter-day-jane-austen\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen by Emma Garman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 24, 2017 \u2013   The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. 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